Chapter 21

Wes had reached the pavement an instant after Zoe had bounced off the bumper. The woman driving had leapt from the car and run, crying, around to the front, and had picked up the little dog and cradled her.

Wes had rushed up. "Let me see," he had said. He had put his ear close to Zoe's mouth and nose. Nothing. He had listened to her chest.

Nothing.

Nothing.

And then he had turned her over and, holding her close to him, had squeezed her tight, once, in a Heimlich-like maneuver, and with a gasp and a yelp, she had begun to breathe again.

The woman who had been driving had thrown her arms around Wesley, and around the little dog, too. She's been crying and laughing all at the same time, as little Zoe had wriggled in Wesley's arms.

"Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!" she had said, again and again, and had hugged him again, and  had picked up the little blind dog and hugged her close, and said she was sorry again and again and again.

"How can I thank you?" she had asked Wesley. "I'd do anything."

Wesley had looked at her for a long moment. He was cold and achy and dirty.

"I'd give just about anything for a shower," he had said.

This had brought the woman up short. But then she looked at him, and she looked at the little dog, and she straightened her shoulders, and she looked Wesley in the eye and said, "Sure."

"We have to bring all the dogs, though," he had said. "And the cat."

"You get them in the van, and they can come," the woman had said.

And that is how Zoe and Joey and the cat, and Buddy and Wesley, have come to wake up this morning inside, in a warm little cottage beside a winter-covered pool, in the back yard of a big, weathered home on Plum Bank Road in Old Saybrook.